Silent Valley

by Malla Nunn

  Emmanuel stepped aside, embarrassed at the sharpness of his desire to lap up every detail of the sexual encounter.

  Give me a peek, Cooper. Go on, just one quick one before they finish. I’m asking you nice.

  Emmanuel stayed put. Watching Ella and Karin through to the end would place him at a disadvantage when he questioned them; his guilt and his pleasure would show.

  They’ll be too scared to say a word to you, soldier, the sergeant major fumed. Now get back there, Cooper, or I swear I will rip your fucking lungs out and use them as bagpipes.

  Too late, Emmanuel said.

  The groans inside the natural amphitheatre peaked and then ebbed to soft exhalations of breath. The love bite on Ella’s inner thigh must have happened during one of their more leisurely encounters, he figured.

  He reached for the rifle left against the tree trunk and slid it behind a bush. After a short interval, to allow time for pulling on panties and rebuttoning trousers, he turned back to the enclosed space.

  Karin held Ella’s glowing face between her hands. ‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘The day after.’ Ella pressed a kiss against the Afrikaner woman’s rough palm. ‘My mother has one of her quacks coming to the house. This one uses magnets to draw out bad humours and cure migraine headaches and asthma.’

  ‘I’m no doctor,’ Emmanuel said from the entrance to the secret place, ‘but your lungs sound just fine to me, Ella. Must be the fresh air and exercise.’

  Karin stepped in front of Ella to protect her. She glanced at the spot where she’d left the rifle. When she didn’t see it, she looked Emmanuel over and weighed her strength against his.

  ‘You’ll get the .22 back after the two of you answer some questions,’ Emmanuel said, adding to Karin, ‘Even if you get through me, Constable Shabalala is waiting outside and he will pin you like a butterfly.’

  Ella stood up straight with her brunette hair teased out and the neckline of her dress askew, but her sense of social superiority appeared intact. ‘My brother said you were off the case. You have no right to question us, Detective Cooper.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not here as a policeman.’ Emmanuel knew the frosty accent was meant to put him in his place. ‘I’m just a private citizen shocked at witnessing an English and an Afrikaner woman having sex in public.’

  ‘What do you want, Cooper?’ Karin became pragmatic. She understood how a snare worked. The harder you kicked, the tighter the wires pulled.

  ‘Tell me about Philani,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You knew he was hiding in the shelter.’

  Karin and Ella exchanged looks, both searching for the least damaging solution to their dilemma. Talk to the policeman, or appear in the local court on immorality charges?

  ‘Not for the whole time,’ Karin said. ‘I first saw him on Saturday night just before sunset collecting firewood near the shelter. He hid but I knew he was there.’

  ‘The second time?’

  ‘Sunday evening on my way home. It was dark and he had a fire going. He wasn’t too bright for a fugitive. I walked by and . . .’ Karin hesitated and Ella stroked her arm with soft fingers. They’d obviously talked about the Philani situation before this. ‘A Zulu woman was with him. She was in the shelter, so I didn’t see her very well except for the brown buckskin with shiny beads on her shoulders. I heard her voice.’

  ‘Old, young, fat, skinny?’ Emmanuel asked.

  ‘Young but not a girl. Confident-sounding.’

  ‘Saying what exactly?’

  ‘Something about personally talking to Chief Matebula,’ Karin said. ‘I didn’t stop to listen.’

  ‘You should have told me this two days ago,’ Emmanuel said. General Hyland would not have bothered to pick up the phone and kill the investigation if he’d known, or even suspected, that Amahle’s murder was a black-on-black crime.

  ‘I told Pa I was going to check traps on Sugar Hill on Friday, which is way in the other direction from here,’ Karin said. ‘Sunday I said I was going to the river to pray at sunset and wouldn’t be home till after dark. If I’d told him about seeing Philani, Pa would have known I was lying about where I’d gone.’

  And the deeper truth, that she was sparking an English woman on a rock bed in the woods, was unspeakable. Emmanuel knew personally the consequences of being caught and then judged a sinner. He didn’t wish it on anyone.

  Karin checked the position of the sun overhead. Each minute took her away from work that needed doing on the farm and buck that she had to hunt across the hills. Ella was a luxurious time waster. ‘Can I go now?’ she asked. ‘Pa’s expecting me back home.’

  ‘Can you remember any other details about this woman?’

  ‘No.’ Karin straightened her belt buckle and checked that her shirt buttons were fastened. The white flower had fallen from her hair and lay crushed on the ground. ‘Confident, like I said. Not one of those Zulu women who don’t speak without getting a man’s permission first.’

  Karin’s observation fitted with some of what Emmanuel had figured. The person who’d murdered Amahle and Philani got near enough to pierce them with a small, specialised weapon. This murderer killed with confidence and skill.

  ‘You can go,’ he said to Karin. ‘If you double back here with your .22, Constable Shabalala will hear you and bring you down long before you get anywhere close. He’s half-Shangaan, so don’t even try it.’

  In the pantheon of South African race groups, every tribe had a special talent. Zulus had a gift for fighting and fine beadwork, the Pondo were cunning with money and the Shangaan had a freakish ability to track animals across any terrain.

  Karin reached out a hand to Ella and said, ‘Come.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Emmanuel said. ‘I have a couple of questions for you, Ella.’

  Karin hesitated, reluctant to leave her lover in their hideout with a man. If the situation were reversed, however, Emmanuel knew Ella would skip home without questioning Karin’s loyalty. No relationship was ever truly equal.

  ‘Day after tomorrow, then.’ Karin threaded her fingers through Ella’s hair and kissed her on the mouth. She threw Emmanuel a hard look to reinforce that she, Karin Paulus, was boss of this English miss.

  Emmanuel retrieved the rifle and pulled back the bolt, ejecting the bullet out of the breach before unclipping the magazine and removing the bullets. He returned the rifle. Karin disappeared into the lacework of trees and did not look back.

  ‘You called the murder in to the police in Durban, didn’t you?’ he said and turned to Ella, who now sat on the smooth rock with her legs crossed. No other white woman in the valley had a motive for making the call and access to a telephone.

  ‘Constable Bagley is one of my brother’s white kaffirs,’ Ella said. ‘He’d have taken a couple of statements and closed the case. I wanted a proper investigation.’

  ‘Ahh . . .’ Emmanuel let his disbelief show. ‘Calling in outside help had nothing to do with getting your big brother into hot water and watching him get burned?’

  ‘Thomas has everything his own way. It’s bad for his character.’

  ‘And he keeps pushing the marriage angle which you’re, understandably, not so keen on.’

  Ella shrugged. ‘One day, maybe, but not right now.’

  Emmanuel suspected that Ella understood the preordained trajectory of her relationship with Karin. Girls from posh English families did not set up house with Afrikaner tomboys. They moved to grand homes with rich husbands and, if they felt the need, satisfied their desires as Ella did now – in secret and without promises.

  ‘How did you find out about Amahle?’ he asked.

  ‘I went to the lake for a cigarette after dinner on Saturday night. Gabriel was in the boathouse babbling on about needing a pillow to help Amahle sleep on the hill.’ Ella slid off the stone platform and straightened her skirt. ‘I got enough out of him to guess she was badly hurt or dead.’

  ‘You called the police knowing Gabriel would be implicated in whatever happened to Amahle?’ The call
to Durban was more than spite at an older brother’s power; it was lobbing a hand grenade into the family living room.

  ‘It was risky,’ she admitted. ‘But there’s no way Gabriel could have hurt her. He was her baby.’

  ‘Amahle was like a mother to him?’ Emmanuel asked.

  ‘She was more like a sister,’ Ella said. ‘A big sister who didn’t care if he made a fool of himself in town or on family trips to the beach.’

  ‘Dr Daglish and Constable Bagley thought there was more to the relationship than that,’ Emmanuel said.

  ‘I don’t think it went that far. All the native men in the valley were after Amahle but she let Gabriel get close because he didn’t want her that way. Together, they made their own little world.’

  ‘The other housemaids must have thought their relationship was strange. I bet they didn’t like the extra pay Amahle received from your mother, either.’

  ‘None of the house servants liked Amahle,’ Ella said. ‘Not really. She was different from them. She always wanted more and usually got it from my mother. The other maids stayed out of her way.’

  Emmanuel ran a mental inventory of the Zulu housemaids at Little Flint Farm: the older, nervous woman who’d waited on the porch to greet them, and the shy laundry maid with a basket balanced atop her head. Neither looked ‘confident’, but both of them knew Amahle and Philani well enough to get close without arousing suspicion. Shabalala had talked to the maids and the gardeners. He might have more details to add to the new information.

  ‘And you?’ Emmanuel asked.

  ‘It worked out for me. Amahle got the run of the house. I got to take long walks in the hills instead of sitting indoors and sewing things for my glory box.’ Ella was matter of fact. ‘I made sure to slip her a lipstick or a toothbrush once in a while just in case she’d read my diary and figured out about me and Karin.’

  That was where the luxury items in the cardboard box at the kraal came from: they were bribes from the little madam to buy a servant’s silence.

  ‘You didn’t like Amahle either,’ Emmanuel said.

  ‘Not at all, but she was clever, I’ll give her that. You couldn’t tell what she really loved and what she hated. She changed to suit whoever she was with. It was a good trick. I never learned it.’ Ella picked up the crushed white flower and rolled it between her palms to mark them with scent.

  ‘Keeping your true self hidden from others isn’t a trick,’ Emmanuel said. ‘It’s a sacrifice.’

  Dutiful daughter, perfect servant, runaway and manipulator of sexual desire, Amahle was all these things. On dark country nights lit only by the moon and stars, what version of herself did she take to bed?

  ‘You can go.’ Emmanuel stepped aside. ‘If you stay away too long your mother and brother will be suspicious.’

  ‘They already are.’ Ella paused under the arch of branches, looked at him and said, ‘You’re wrong about me, Detective. I do love her.’

  The thoughts he’d had on the longevity of Karin and Ella’s relationship had shown on his face as clearly as if he’d spoken them aloud.

  ‘Loving someone and loving to fuck them are two different things.’ Emmanuel heard the cynicism in his voice. ‘Karin is a sport and a pastime. If your brother or your mother ever found out about her . . . what then?’

  Ella shrugged but broke off eye contact.

  ‘You’ll tell them that she forced you against your will. Then you’ll cry and they’ll believe you because the truth would be too hard to face. Goodbye, Karin. Hello, Stephen or Andrew or Harry, or whatever your future husband will be called. Now tell me what I’ve said isn’t true.’

  He had lived every chapter of the wrong love story as a teenager at the Fountain of Light boarding school and knew there’d be no happy ending to Ella’s, just the taste of blood in her mouth after being discovered and the mark of her lover still on her skin – long after Karin was gone. Worse than physical pain was the shame and self-loathing on the face of the one who’d come to you at nightfall and promised it was forever.

  ‘You make it sound so mercenary.’ Ella paled. ‘I don’t make the rules.’

  ‘Or the laws,’ Emmanuel said and immediately regretted it. If he was guilty of breaking any law it was the one that said, ‘Look but don’t touch. Think but don’t act.’

  ‘You wouldn’t tell . . .’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  His own hypocrisy was breathtaking. After being caught with Maria, the predikant’s daughter and brutally punished for the sin of fornication, he’d chased pleasure everywhere and found it. Love, he left alone. He’d given only a fraction of himself to his ex-wife Angela during their marriage and never let her get close enough to touch the darkness inside him. The old man, Baba Kaleni, saw the easy paths he’d taken and the opportunities for deep connection that he’d let pass. He was a passenger in life, a stowaway carrying only the baggage left to him by the war.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did.’ Emmanuel walked out to the avenue of trees. ‘I apologise.’

  Ella nodded and they trod back through the leaves to the path. Shabalala waited at the point where Emmanuel had left him. He caught sight of Ella and responded by doing what every well-mannered black African did when confronted with the shocking behaviour of white people – he studied his toes.

  ‘Good luck with the rest of the investigation, Detective Cooper.’ Ella similarly ignored the Zulu detective. ‘I hope you find that woman.’

  ‘You mean it?’ Emmanuel was sceptical.

  ‘Outside of her mother and sister, Gabriel was the only person that Amahle really loved. My brother will miss her.’ She moved to the tumbledown path connecting the mountain to Little Flint Farm, taking her time getting there.

  ‘The Dutch woman and the Englishwoman?’ Shabalala whispered the question to Emmanuel as Ella slipped out of view.

  ‘Ja,’ he replied. ‘It’s exactly what you think.’

  ‘This is allowed if they are both European?’

  ‘No, it most certainly is not.’ Emmanuel laughed. Whites were given more freedom than blacks in almost every aspect of life so it was no surprise that Shabalala needed clarification. ‘They’re like the rest of us, breaking the rules when no-one is looking.’

  The two men moved from tree shade to the sunlit mountain path. The green valley and the whitewashed buildings of Little Flint Farm spread out below. Emmanuel sat down on a fallen tree trunk and passed on the information about the Zulu woman in Philani’s rock shelter. ‘Run me through each of the Reed housemaids,’ he said.

  ‘There are three.’ Shabalala perched on the log with his notebook flipped to the relevant page. ‘Betty Zuma is forty-three years old. A widow with two grown sons, both in Johannesburg. She was the one to greet us on the porch. She lives in the servants’ quarters behind the big house and stays on the farm every day except Sunday. Friday night she served the family dinner and then cleaned afterwards.’

  ‘That strikes her from the list,’ Emmanuel said. ‘She was working when Amahle was killed.’

  ‘Yebo, Sergeant. She is not the one.’ Shabalala flicked to a new page. ‘The next maid is Lindiwe Mabuza, eighteen years old and still unmarried. On Friday she stayed late at the farm because Amahle left early and the big missus said the tablecloths for breakfast and lunch must be ironed.’

  Emmanuel could almost hear Lindiwe’s sullen tone as she recalled the hours of Friday night ticking away in the company of a coal-heated iron and a bucket of starch.

  ‘Also working,’ Shabalala said and found the next interview. ‘Number three is Mercy Mhaule, twenty years old, unmarried but happy to be a second or third wife if necessary. She works only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday till four in the afternoon.’

  ‘Describe her,’ Emmanuel said. The age was right and Mercy had left before Amahle on the night she was killed.

  ‘She is twenty years old . . .’ Shabalala faltered and then said, ‘Full of life.’

  ‘What are you r
eally saying, Constable?’ The Zulu detective was holding back, too embarrassed to continue. ‘I promise not to tell.’

  ‘Smooth skin, fat lips and big brown eyes like a doe.’

  ‘Pretty,’ Emmanuel said. He’d missed seeing Mercy himself but the rise of heat in Shabalala’s face told him all he needed to know.

  ‘Yebo.’ Shabalala shoved the notebook away.

  ‘But not the daughter of a chief pulling higher wages than anyone else. Amahle was also the big madam’s pet and the boy, Gabriel, was hers.’ Emmanuel checked his watch. A young, pretty, jealous housemaid could be the perfect rival for Amahle. ‘Mercy knocks off in three hours. I think we should keep a watch on Little Flint Farm and grab her on her way home.’

  Shabalala stood up and straightened his jacket, ill at ease. Emmanuel waited for him to speak. If the Zulu policeman could not share a confidence here on an isolated mountain with the two of them neck-deep in a barely legal investigation, he never would.

  ‘She was so pleasing . . .’ Shabalala blew air out through his teeth. ‘Maybe I did not look at this woman properly and did not ask the right questions.’

  ‘Welcome to the detective branch,’ Emmanuel said. ‘You’ve passed two big milestones. The first was throwing up at the crime scene, and now you regret not seeing beyond the surface of things and asking harder questions.’

  ‘You’re not angry?’

  ‘No,’ Emmanuel said. He stood up to make eye contact. ‘I had no idea a Zulu woman could be a suspect till we caught Karin Paulus with her khakis down. That was thirty minutes ago. We learn as we go.’

  ‘And then we learn more,’ Shabalala said.

  ‘In theory, yes.’ Emmanuel started down to the valley. ‘Mercy might be a dead end but we have to talk to her and see what we find out.’

  The dirt path twisted through rock fields and under marula trees. Despite what he’d said to Shabalala, Emmanuel had a good feeling about Mercy Mhaule, the pretty maid living in Amahle’s shadow.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The dying sun set fire to the sky. Birds roosted for the night and a warm breeze stirred the sagebrush and the yellowwood trees. Emmanuel sat cross-legged, bathed in the light of day’s end. The indestructible beauty of the world amazed him. A full moon rising above the battlefield, peach blossoms falling on a freshly filled grave, blades of grass emerging from the cracked pavement of a razed town, and mankind toiling like ants across the surface. War or peace, the earth did not care.